Yitzchok Tuvia Weiss

Yitzchok Tuvia Weiss (right)

Rabbi Yitzchok Tuvia Weiss is the Chief Rabbi or Gaavad (Gaon Av Beis Din) of Jerusalem for the Edah HaChareidis. He was appointed to this post in 2004, after having served as a dayan of the Machzike Hadass community of Antwerp, Belgium.^[1] Rabbi Weiss is a British national.

According to his late brother, he was born in Slovakia to Salomon Weiss, a timber merchant. He attended the local secular school in the mornings^[2] and studied with a private melamed in the afternoons.^[3]

Before World War II, he escaped Slovakia on a Kindertransport, leaving his parents and family behind.^[3] He arrived with the Kindertransport at London after Shavuos in 1939, where he celebrated the Shabbos of his bar mitzvah at the home of a British woman who took him in. The only sefer he received for his bar mitzvah was a copy of the Kitzur Shulchan Aruch, which he studied many weeks until he mastered it. He also received a pair of tefillin, sent to him from his father through the Red Cross before he was martyred. By the time the tefillin arrived, neither of his parents were alive.^[4] He continued his education at Yeshivas Toras Emes in Stamford Hill, London, (also known as Shneider's Yeshiva) where he studied under Rabbi Moshe (Yehuda) Schneider. One of his peers at the Yeshiva was Rabbi Moishe Sternbuch who currently serves alongside him as the Raavad (Rosh Av Beis Din) of Jerusalem. After his marriage, he studied at the Gateshead Kollel under Rabbi Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler, who served as rosh kollel.^[3]

A few years later, Rabbi Weiss moved to London where he was hired as a maggid shiur at a yeshiva and as a posek and rav of a shul. Later, he moved to Antwerp where he served as a maggid shiur at a yeshiva in Wilrijk and where he was appointed as dayan in 1967.^[5]

When he accepted his new role as Gaavad, he also adopted the traditional Jerusalem mode of dress.^[6]

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